Creating a common set of standards for all evidence may be impossible but according to Sir Iain Chalmers, one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration, there are some basic principles of good evidence that apply...

In this guest blog, Stephen Bediako, Founder and Managing Director of The Social Innovation Partnership, attempts to make sense of the sudden splurge of evidence initiatives in the UK.  It’s an evidence fest. A sudden splurge...

Recent arguments about Syria have provoked memories of the evidence in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ used to help support action against Iraq.  Professor Rob Briner, Vice-Chair of the international Centre for Evidence-Based Management, describes how we can do better...

  How is social media data accessed and what are the challenges in using it to understand our world?  John Davies of Nesta’s Policy and Research team discusses some of the issues and considers how this...

  In the grant making world we promote the generation of huge amounts of information. It manifests in a multitude of ways, piles of monitoring papers, lengthy pdfs of analysis, carefully crafted responses to outcome statements,...

  Through the below parody,  Ray Pawson, Professor of Social Research Methodology at Leeds University, explores the reality of the complexity of the science of evaluation, focusing on RCTs and their growing reputation as the ‘gold...

  In this blog, the Alliance’s Jonathan Breckon discusses how an ‘evidence-informed’ approach can bridge the gap between research and practice. How do we decide what works? Teachers, police officers, social workers, healthcare professionals and many...